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Myths

Myth	Result
Climbing Boots was an inside job to make bank for an employee	False
We thought Old School would die quickly.	True
We flag accounts as 'Lucky', and they get a higher chance of drops	False
Players are our QA Team	True & False
Pickpocketing from behind an NPC increases your chances of success.	False
Sailing was never planned to go in-game.	False
Player Moderators are chosen from the players who submit the most reports in-game.	False
In Runescape the chicken came before the egg.	True & False
Mod Reach intentionally developed and abused the corporeal beast invulnerability bug.	False
We do stealth nerfs to content without informing anyone.	True & False
When you get a skill pet you are put on a 2 week coldown before you can receive another.	False
Original Jad was put into the game without a single J-mod being able to defeat it.	True & False
Runescape has hundreds more devs than Old School	False
We keep notes on specific players, particularly those deemed troublesome.	True
When you find one strange rock in Runescape, the second will be harder to find.	True
Former U.S. President George W. Bush plays Runescape.	True & False
The Twister Bow and max cash bugs were added maliciously to Old School.	False
Storylines are made up as they go along.	True and False
We will never release another competitive game mode in Runescape.	True & False
On release of a new boss, drop rates are slightly increased for a short time.	False
We regret the way the slug series ended on Runescape	True & False
At any point in time, killing mastyx in Dungeoneering reduce your xp.	False
Shauny leaked 'Next Gen' as a publicity stunt.	False
It's easy to add content like soul wars and stealing creation to Old School	False
We always intended for ranged fighters to train by safe-spotting	False
Jmods can force their own agenda into Runescape and Oldschool	True & False
Runescript is hard to develop on and leads to mistakes.	True & False

Audience Myths

Audience ones are Myths for audience responses.

Myth	Result
You have a ridiculous offer on the GE for a High Value Item.	True
You did Mourning's End Part 2 with a guide.	True
None of you know how to pronounce Ardougne.	False
You all spacebar through quests	True & False
You've previously chosen a display name you regret.	True & False
You have called in sick on release day.	True

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Myths Explained

Climbing Boots:

Players had higher value than the system had decided, so we increased the value and a few players just happened to have a lot in their bank. We've learned a lot from it so nothing like it happens again.

Old School Dead?:

The general feeling in the studio was that in the first 6 months it was just going to go away. It was only after 6 months after launch with the release of God wars dungeon were the players began to stabilize and then started to grow. We are very happy it worked out differently.

Lucky Accounts:

When accounts are created they are all equal and we don't know where the account will go. If it were true we'd have to be able to detect what kind of account it was and apply a luck mechanic associated with that.

Player QA

In industry terms OSRS and RS have 2 devs for every 1 tester. In industry terms that's quite high. For larger projects we have outsource QA and bundle them onto projects. The reason several significant issues have popped up recently are primarily due to legacy code. We've taken this head on with a brand new team created 3 months ago called the Core Experience team. You will be introduced to them in a designer diary soon and will hit on the game feel and modernize it from the ground up. Players do weird things and find some thing automated tests couldn't.

Pickpocketing:

Runescape is a pretty simple game, there's no line-of-sight or whether you are behind or not. Most of the time you chasing them which is why you are behind them.

Sailing:

For Runescape: We've spent more time joking on it than working on it. The closets we've came to having it in-game was 18 months ago where we got together some skill ideas and found 5 we really liked. Skills we had: Necromancy, Archaeology, Sailing, Spellcrafting, Trading. Sailing was in the middle of the pack. In the future who knows.

PMods

Everyone knows Pmods are chosen from the players who use the most smiley faces in the game chat. But seriously we look at game biases and try to have an equal number of Pmods respective to the number of players in each game (RS/OSRS). We look at timezones to make sure there's a heath number on around the clock. We pull about 1000 accounts a month and check to make sure they have security and aren't serious rule breakers. Then we invite about 100 players a month to become a PMod and only 30 accept.

Chicken

Initially, did a ton of research but after talking to the Gower brothers the answer has changed. The chicken came first because Ian drew the chicken while Paul was designing Lumbridge/Cook's Assistant he knew he could use some eggs, but there was no cow, so he drew one on Paintshop pro. If we are talking about when it came into existence, then we can look at how the server generates things. In RS/OSRS NPS spawn first. But in Classic objects spawned first. So the egg came before the chicken in Classic. BUT your experience is client side not server side, so on the client side NPCs render first. So the answer is the Chicken.

Corporeal Beast

It was just a bug. It was an obscure one. Mod Reach's departure and the timing of this bug were just coincidental.

Stealth Nerfs

We used to do stealth nerfs in the past, but in the last 5 years we've tried no to by letting players know via patch notes or on twitter.

MEP2 - Audience Myth

Mod Dylan and Mod Mark designed the Light puzzle one evening while drunk. They didn't understand their notes the next day. So they decided to get drunk again so they could understand it. And they did and were able to figure it out and coded it shortly later.

Skillpets

No such thing, you can get them in the same tick if you are lucky enough.

Jad

When we first designed it we kept making it harder and harder and harder everytime we did it. There were only a few in QA who got their heads around wall hugging and trapping the healers. So we were able to defeat it, but just before launch the difficulty was increased once more, so the final level of difficulty wasn't completed before it was made live.

Dev Size

We get it, the OSRS team only has 20-25 people but there are hundreds of people who do cross-product work at the studio, Marketing, Analytics, Publishing, Creative services, Player Support, Tech teams. In terms of those generating content, yes the Runescape team is bigger but not by hundreds.

Player Notes

We need to keep notes for when players transfer bonds to the wrong game. We need to know people involved in serious rule breaking and bug abuse, and when you contact customer support there may be notes as well. But we don't keep personal notes, it's about the account not the person behind it.

Strange Rocks

You are 50% less likely to get the same type of strange rock, however this goes away if you get another strange rock of a different skill.

George W. Bush

If you are a leader you probably don't use your real name in your online account. So we just looked for an account with 99 attack... We just don't know but it is possible. But as for well known players who play the game, we have a very regular player who logs in every day from a really unusual internet connection in the Vatican city. But we don't know who it is.

OSRS Bugs

Bug of these bugs had a big impact on the game causing us to take it offline and do rollbacks. They were just simple bugs/mistakes. The bow was just incorrectly mapped down and we have since improved our tools to prevent something like this from happening again. The max cash bug was just an error in a complex part of the code.

Storylines

When we make storylines we want to keep track of what you like. We see what you latch on. We write down notes for 5-6 quests in the future for what we want to happen but as people leave and new developers work on it those designs can change with their own ideas.

Competitive games modes

If you talk with anyone who worked on Dimension of the Damned, they have post-traumatic stress. We will never ever do that again. But yet there's still a love for something like Darkscape seasonal. We have a new head of Esports and while she will work with OSRS, there's still a chance we can do competitive stuff. Not necessarily modes or esports. Skilling, clue scrolls, bossing.

Boss Drop Rates

This only happens when we accidentally screw up a drop-rate, never intentional, most of the time it's me (Timbo).

Slug Quest

It's really important to allow devs to input their own creativity in the game. At that time we've done a lot of traditional boss fights and we wanted to do something different, and brought an idea to the table and we tried it out. Osborne: SitW was my 2nd design review and I'm lucky to still be here. It's my shame, there were good things in the quest, but if you build up a boss in a number of quest, killing them with a pillar isn't a good idea.

DG Mastyx

We looked at the code and it isn't true.

Next Gen

It was a complete accident. We do internal streams every month and right at the end they showed us a logo to gather feedback, it was the very last slide. Shauny accidentally loaded that slide during his stream later that day. Remind Shauny about it.

OSRS Minigames

Whether it's recreating something or creating something from scratch the technical process is the same. We may refer to the original code-base to understand how certain things worked, but in general, when we try to recreate something it's harder as we have to get all the nuisances right and can take more time.

Safespots

When we add content in the game sometimes players use it in ways we weren't expecting. In classic that was never much the case. But in RS2 we added things like route finding for NPCs and things that change the way players trained things. When we tested those things we realized that wasn't the way players wanted to do things, so we removed some of the things we could do to preserve the game-play that existed.

Gower Brothers: Some NPCs we always intended you to safe spot, like the rat in tutorial island or the demon the wizard tower.

Jmod Agendas

One of the best things is that you can see certain finger prints of devs who made certain pieces of content. But there are still steps to stop us from forcing things into the game that are bad such as green-light steps and sprint reviews, and OSRS the poll system.

Runescript

At first it's challenging but it was a program designed to be easy to develop with. One thing is being able to prototype ideas. RS Classic was a pain in the ass to code on. After we shifted in RS2 everyone forgot, and when bugs appeared in Classic everyone didn't know what to do.

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